Word: alther
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kinflicks, Alther...
...Kinflicks, Alther...
Twitching Ganglia. Exceptions to this procrustean rule are rare enough to be newsworthy. Lisa Alther's Kinflicks is enjoying a first printing of 30,000 copies, is a forthcoming alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the subject of considerable prepublication hyperbole. When the ganglia of the New York literary world begin to twitch in this manner, it is a sure sign that something more than literary merit is at work. First books by unknowns do not become events simply because they are good. Frequently, as Mae West once observed in another context, goodness has nothing...
Cartoon Eccentrics. Novelist Alther, 31, draws this story in broad strokes, and as exuberant caricature Kinflicks is authentically inspired. The chapter on Ginny's communal life at the "Free Farmlet" is a wicked send-up of half-baked ideas and less well-prepared menus: "Dinner was a murky soup, filled with dark sodden clumps that looked like leaves from the bottom of a compost pile and that tasted like decomposing seaweed, and whole grain bread which you needed diamond-tipped teeth to chew." The novel teems with cartoon eccentrics mouthing balloonfuls of in flated nonsense...
...Alther tries to make the illness and eventual death of Ginny's mother the rite of passage that will turn the daughter into a self-winding adult. But Mrs. Babcock, whose suffering and despair are movingly portrayed, seems to have been smuggled in from a different novel. Kinflicks, for better and worse, belongs to Ginny and her amusing, if hardly profound, moral: Sisterhood is Slapstick...